Can you believe in both?
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Is it necessary to ignore science to be a Christian? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.
Let’s start with saying what this post is not. This is not an argument that Christianity is true. I am not going to attempt to show you in this post that God exists or that Jesus rose from the dead. What it is going to be is arguing against an argument of ignorant internet atheists. I would hope a thinking atheist would read this and say “I don’t agree with your Christianity, but I can agree with this post.”
Yesterday, I again encountered the claim that to be a Christian, you have to ignore science. We know today that people don’t fly and that virgins don’t give birth (Incidentally, I do affirm the virgin birth) or that people don’t come back to life after three days. We know this because we live in an age of science.
When I encounter this, I always ask the same question. When was it that science made these discoveries? When did we discover that sex makes babies or that dead people stay dead? You won’t find an answer to that because no scientist discovered that. There is no need for a scientist to write a paper something along the lines of “A Conclusive Finding That Dead People Stay Dead.”
The ancients certainly did not have the scientific knowledge that we had today, but that doesn’t mean they were idiots. They knew that it takes sex to make a baby. (Even if we point to in vitro fertilization, we still have sperm going into the egg to fertilize it.) They knew that when Uncle Joe died, he was going to stay dead. They didn’t prop him up in the living room to see what would happen. They buried him. They knew that if you want to travel on the water, you need to build a boat. They knew that if you plant certain seeds, food develops.
So let’s suppose you have someone who believes Jesus rose from the dead, like any Christian does. Are they actively denying science? No. They are saying that they know that all things considered, dead people stay dead, but that it is possible for a God, if He exists, to raise someone like Jesus from the dead.
Does that equal a denial of science? Not a bit. For people like myself, science is telling you what will happen in the materialistic universe assuming there is no outside interference. If a ball is falling, if nothing happens, it will continue to fall. If I catch it, I can stop the fall in mid-drop and assuming it can be held in my hand and is not too heavy, it will not continue to fall. A falling bowling ball from a great enough height, for instance, could crush my hand. It could be even a falling baseball dropped from the top of the Empire State Building or thrown off an airplane could have deadly velocity at the ground level.
It could hypothetically be the case that miracles are impossible, but that is not determined by science. That is a question of metaphysics and philosophy. You can study all the science you want and if that’s all you study, you will never answer the question. Science can give evidence, but it itself cannot prove or disprove the existing of God.
As a believer in miracles, it is not because I am anti-science. It is because I believe there is evidence for these miracles. In the cases where the miracles happened, if they had not happened, all would have happened the way that science predicts that it would happen.
I also think that people who argue against certain ideas in science are not wanting to intentionally deny science. Readers of my blog know that I don’t argue yea or nay on evolution, for example. I do know plenty of Christians who are skeptical of evolution. Their arguments they seek to put forward are normally scientific ones. They have some scientific problems with the idea. You could say all you want their theology is driving their science, but that doesn’t change the data.
Are their arguments right? Not for me to say. That’s for the scientists to say. However, if these are genuinely scientific objections, they are not saying “I know the science shows that evolution is true, but I want to argue against it anyway.” They are saying “If you really studied the science, you would see that evolution is not true.” Again, I’m not saying who is and isn’t right in this, but simply the attitude. I leave it to the scientists to debate that
So no to the atheist out there who thinks being a Christian is anti-science. All it means is we believe in a God who does do miracles from time to time. If no miracles take place, then we have no problem that what is predicted scientifically will happen. Again, this does not mean that miracles are necessarily actual. It could be that miracles are possible, but they have never happened. The person making the kind of argument I am going against today would have to show that miracles are impossible and not just that they have never happened. You could try to argue that philosophically, but you won’t argue that scientifically.
Give ancient people some credit. They were not as stupid as we think they were.
In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)
Link
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Is it necessary to ignore science to be a Christian? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.
Let’s start with saying what this post is not. This is not an argument that Christianity is true. I am not going to attempt to show you in this post that God exists or that Jesus rose from the dead. What it is going to be is arguing against an argument of ignorant internet atheists. I would hope a thinking atheist would read this and say “I don’t agree with your Christianity, but I can agree with this post.”
Yesterday, I again encountered the claim that to be a Christian, you have to ignore science. We know today that people don’t fly and that virgins don’t give birth (Incidentally, I do affirm the virgin birth) or that people don’t come back to life after three days. We know this because we live in an age of science.
When I encounter this, I always ask the same question. When was it that science made these discoveries? When did we discover that sex makes babies or that dead people stay dead? You won’t find an answer to that because no scientist discovered that. There is no need for a scientist to write a paper something along the lines of “A Conclusive Finding That Dead People Stay Dead.”
The ancients certainly did not have the scientific knowledge that we had today, but that doesn’t mean they were idiots. They knew that it takes sex to make a baby. (Even if we point to in vitro fertilization, we still have sperm going into the egg to fertilize it.) They knew that when Uncle Joe died, he was going to stay dead. They didn’t prop him up in the living room to see what would happen. They buried him. They knew that if you want to travel on the water, you need to build a boat. They knew that if you plant certain seeds, food develops.
So let’s suppose you have someone who believes Jesus rose from the dead, like any Christian does. Are they actively denying science? No. They are saying that they know that all things considered, dead people stay dead, but that it is possible for a God, if He exists, to raise someone like Jesus from the dead.
Does that equal a denial of science? Not a bit. For people like myself, science is telling you what will happen in the materialistic universe assuming there is no outside interference. If a ball is falling, if nothing happens, it will continue to fall. If I catch it, I can stop the fall in mid-drop and assuming it can be held in my hand and is not too heavy, it will not continue to fall. A falling bowling ball from a great enough height, for instance, could crush my hand. It could be even a falling baseball dropped from the top of the Empire State Building or thrown off an airplane could have deadly velocity at the ground level.
It could hypothetically be the case that miracles are impossible, but that is not determined by science. That is a question of metaphysics and philosophy. You can study all the science you want and if that’s all you study, you will never answer the question. Science can give evidence, but it itself cannot prove or disprove the existing of God.
As a believer in miracles, it is not because I am anti-science. It is because I believe there is evidence for these miracles. In the cases where the miracles happened, if they had not happened, all would have happened the way that science predicts that it would happen.
I also think that people who argue against certain ideas in science are not wanting to intentionally deny science. Readers of my blog know that I don’t argue yea or nay on evolution, for example. I do know plenty of Christians who are skeptical of evolution. Their arguments they seek to put forward are normally scientific ones. They have some scientific problems with the idea. You could say all you want their theology is driving their science, but that doesn’t change the data.
Are their arguments right? Not for me to say. That’s for the scientists to say. However, if these are genuinely scientific objections, they are not saying “I know the science shows that evolution is true, but I want to argue against it anyway.” They are saying “If you really studied the science, you would see that evolution is not true.” Again, I’m not saying who is and isn’t right in this, but simply the attitude. I leave it to the scientists to debate that
So no to the atheist out there who thinks being a Christian is anti-science. All it means is we believe in a God who does do miracles from time to time. If no miracles take place, then we have no problem that what is predicted scientifically will happen. Again, this does not mean that miracles are necessarily actual. It could be that miracles are possible, but they have never happened. The person making the kind of argument I am going against today would have to show that miracles are impossible and not just that they have never happened. You could try to argue that philosophically, but you won’t argue that scientifically.
Give ancient people some credit. They were not as stupid as we think they were.
In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)
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